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Declassified Nuclear Weapon Safety Development History Reports

by: www.nukegate.org

Publication date: 2014-07-13
Usage: Public Domain Mark 1.0
Topics: nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, civil defence, civil defense
Collection: opensource
Language: English
Item Size: 451.5M

For detailed discussion of this report, please see http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/debunking-hardened-dogma-of-exaggerated.html Professor Freeman Dyson debunked the popular myths in his 1985 book Weapons and Hope (Harper and Row, New York, pp. 33-41):

“In 1957 ... Nevil Shute Norway published On the Beach, a description of mankind wiped out by radiological warfare [he had also previously published guesswork speculations about war in Britain in his April 1939 novel, What Happened to the Corbetts, which incorrectly speculated that bombing would cause a lack of clean water and cause that diseases like cholera to spread]. Norway's poignant translation of apocalyptic disaster into the everyday voices of real people caught the imagination of the world. His book became an international best-seller and was made into a successful film. The book and the film created an enduring myth, a myth which entered consciously or subconsciously into all subsequent thinking about nuclear war. ... Almost all the details are wrong: radioactive cobalt would not substantially increase the lethality of large hydrogen bombs; fallout would not descend uniformly over large areas but would fall sporadically in space and time; people could protect themselves from the radioactivity ...

“The first generation of hydrogen bombs which were tested in 1952 and 1954 had yields running from ten to fifteen megatons. They were, from a modern point of view, absurdly and inconveniently large. ... By the time I paid my first visit to Los Alamos, in the summer of 1956, hydrogen bombs of the twenty-megaton class were already considered technologically obsolete; all the experts I spoke to were working on smaller bombs with lower yields. ... The race toward smaller bombs has been driven by ... the cruise missile and the MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicle). ... As soon as cruise missiles and MIRVs are available, high-yield weapons rapidly become obsolete. ... The central paradox of the arms race is the discrepancy between public perception and reality. The public perceives the arms race as giving birth to an endless stream of weapons of ever-increasing destructiveness and ever-increasing danger. ... In the 1950s there was indeed a race to produce weapons of mass destruction ... Since then the arms race has been running strongly in other directions, away from weapons of mass destruction toward weapons of high precision. ... One consequence of the computer revolutions has been the replacement of big hydrogen bombs by the MIRV and the cruise missile.”

Blast damage area equivalent megatons (“equivalent megatonnage,” EMT) are proportional the product the the number of bombs and the 2/3 power of the yield of each bomb. In WWII, 2.2 megatons distributed in 22 million conventional 10^-7 megaton bombs are therefore equivalent to 22,000,000(10^-7)^2/3 = 474 one megaton blast bombs, or 948 nuclear bombs each with a blast yield of 1 megaton (blast being 50% of the total energy of a nuclear explosion). In other words, even a thousand megatons in a nuclear war would not be on a different scale to the 2.2 megatons of highly effective, dispersed small bombs in WWII. The advantage of having nuclear weapons rather than the equivalent deterrent in conventional weapons are:

(1) the cost is cheaper when stockpiling nuclear rather than conventional weapons, both in the weapons, the delivery systems, and the personnel required to employ them (you'd need a vast army to deliver the same deterrent threat in conventional arms than in nuclear weapons, the production costs would be higher, etc.)

(2) the smaller number of nuclear bombs allows more effective control (e.g. each nuclear bomb can be fitted with an expensive and effective safeguards system, which would be uneconomic for the vast equivalent number of conventional bombs),

(3) the amount of fear and suspicion from conventional weapons is actually greater as proved in WWI and WWII outbreaks. E.g., in WWI because conventional weapons were used, they had to be mobilized using millions of conscripts and this was enough to raise tensions and cause counter mobilizations. In addition, the vast conventional mobilization process induces war mentality in millions of people, and the whole thing develops a momentum that is hard to stop let alone reverse without a war. In the 1930s, efforts to control conventional arms through unilateral "arms control" and disarmament by France and Britain to "set a good example" actually led encouraged Hitler's secret rearmament of Germany to exploit the weakness of appeasement.

Some 65 million years ago, 70% of species were killed by the K-T impact event, a 10 km diameter asteroid which hit earth at something like escape velocity releasing 100,000,000 megatons of TNT equivalent. That's 100,000,000 one megaton bombs, or roughly 10,000 times the largest Cold War nuclear weapons stockpile! Yet that was obviously a survivable event for 30% of the species on earth, so it's quite feasible on that basis alone that most people could survive if they were warned and able to evacuate a reliably forecast impact area, and then shelter against the widespread indirect effects like blast, thermal radiation and climatic effects from the dust loading (or heating by a CO2 injection if the asteroid hits limestone CaCO3 rock and reduces enough of it into calcium oxide plus carbon dioxide in the fireball). Nuclear weapons are intrinsically safe from any accidental explosion with appreciable nuclear yield (compared to the conventional explosive they contain) because of the need for simultaneous detonation of more than one detonator within microseconds in order to compress uniformly the core into a supercritical mass, and then the timing for a neutron source needs to be fired in the core at precisely the time of optimum compression. Scare-mongerers and other disarmament deceivers try to claim that American nuclear weapons are accident prone by using the Atomic Energy Act 1954 as cover for obfuscating these simple facts. Over the years, many safety systems to prevent unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, and improved impact insensitive high explosives have been developed to increase reliability. For this reason, nuclear terrorism is the major nuclear weapons hazard.

People need to understand nuclear weapons better in order to appreciate their role in deterring mass wars and ending the conscription or national service that lasted until 1960 in Britain and 1975 in the USA. By this time, nuclear deterrence had taken over from conventional war deterrence. In America it took longer because they thought they could win a conventional war by forcefully persuading the enemy without using nuclear weapons, an idea debunked in Vietnam by 1975 when simple Vietcong tunnel shelters helped to negate the effects of immense payloads of conventional weapons! A return to conventional weapons would either mean risking a return to the World Wars of the pre-nuclear era (WWI and WWII being examples) or alternatively increasing conventional weapons deterrent power to the equivalent of nuclear weapons, which means a massive increase in military expenditure, probably a re-introduction of national service for millions, with an increase of militarism in society. It's time to face the truth about Hiroshima and the validity of civil defense in case of accidents:

https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima